Author: ftrotter

What protocol for NHIN Direct?

[Update 6-10-10: added new spectrum “False Interface Potentia” based on comment from David Tao. Added “End User Perception” based on comment from Erik Pupo.  Removed controversial portions. full explanation at the end]

Currently, the NHIN Direct project is having a debate around what protocol to use.

NHIN Direct is supposed to enable something that “feels like email” to clinical and patient users, but in fact allows for the secure transfer of PHI over the Internet between clinical and patient parties. Essentially, a secure network for PHI messages.

But how to do that? We have to choose a technology suite in order to make that happen and it is not clear which protocol we should be choosing.

Yesterday, I listened to a call where the various implementation teams made the “case” for their particular protocol.

First let me say that I have great sympathy for these implementers, all of them have put in lots of work and thought into their particular implementation approach and all of them have a made a good case. However, Open Source is a meritocracy. We have to decide on one “best” approach for NHIN Direct and not everyone will get what they want. In competitions like this, we might have at least one very happy implementation group, but we are sure to have several approaches that are abandoned. Those people who have worked hard on implementations that will not be used are in a difficult social situation. They will inevitably feel that the group has chosen poorly, and that their work was overlooked. But at the same time the group will be asking for their help in unifying the project behind a single approach (if not a single protocol). As a developer, being in that situation and being rejected really hurts. I have been in the Open Source community long enough to have been on both the “winning” side and the “loosing side” of this several times. It is better to win.

It is critical that the larger group show its appreciation for the work of everyone, even as it rejects most of the approaches. Contributing to an Open Source project like this is expensive emotionally and financially, and just because some implementations will “loose” does not mean that there were valueless. In fact, as we abandon implementation approaches, the project members will do well to recognize the abandoned approaches as “templates for improvement” and/or “concessions to expediency”.”Right” is not really a position anyone gets to take.

To all of the implementation groups: Thank you. Your work, whether embraced or not, is impressive. As you can see later, every approach has merits not found in other approaches. This will be a tough decision.

XMPP

XMPP is basically a chat protocol.

Advantages: Chat has some fundamental advantages over email (SMTP). When a user is offline in a chat context, you can still send them messages, so chat “falls back to” a stored message system like email. But when a user is online, that information can be selectively broadcast to other users, who can then send messages knowing that the person is right there on the keyboard. XMPP was designed from the ground up to handle real-time messaging, and so it might be more appropriate if you consider situations, (i.e. surgery) where you need to transfer messages and attachments and get information back in near-real-time. In fact you might consider an XMPP system as “more compatible” with a tele-medicine approach for this reason. There are also some interesting “subscribe/broadcast” models that XMPP has built into the protocol. There are lots of solid implementations of XMPP currently in the market and the mature ones should be sufficiently configurable to handle the complex security configuration that NHIN Direct will require. So there is a big pile of existing software available and most of it is Open Source.

Disadvantages:

Not many people understand XMPP and it is not as widely used as email. It is not out-of-the-box compatible with NHIN Exchange.

Score:

  • New Implementation Coding Required: almost none: 10
  • Open Source implementations available: Lots: 10
  • Existing experts: some but not many: 5
  • Compatibility with NHIN Exchange: must be built from scratch: 1
  • Future Flexibility: the protocol is the protocol, new stuff has to go on top: 3
  • Mature Standard: Yes huge chat networks already running: 10
  • End User Interface Familiarity: Lots of people use chat: 7
  • False Interface Potential: Might make users think “this is just chat”: 2
  • End User Perception: You are using chat for secure PHI exchange? Wrong perception of course, but still not good: 2
  • Cool feature bonus: +5 for enabling real-time chat

Total: 55

REST

REST is web-based software design philosophy.

Advantages: REST lets you build really complex things really quickly. As proof, the REST implementation basically already has a working prototype. REST is extremely powerful and will allow rapid iteration of future versions. As we have future requirements we can build them easily.

Disadvantages: You are building a messaging infrastructure from scratch. You will have to re-invent strategies for reliability, message queuing, and countless other things that you do not realize that SMTP or XMPP are doing for you. It is not out-of-the-box compatible with NHIN Exchange.

Score:

  • New Implementation Coding Required: almost everything: 1
  • Open Source implementations available: Lots of good REST libraries: 10
  • Existing experts: no experts in what does not yet exist: 1
  • Compatibility with NHIN Exchange: must be built from scratch: 1
  • Future Flexibility: Allows for very rapid iteration: 10
  • Mature Standard: While REST is mature, the application design on top is not all, it will be totally new: 1
  • End User Interface Familiarity: Interfaces will likely mimic email but they will be untested and totally new: 3
  • False Interface Potential: Because the interfaces will be new, notions of PHI transfer can be built in: 5
  • End User Perception: Essentially none, its reputation will stand on itself, and because we will do a good job, this is not a disadvantage: 10

Total: 42

IHE

IHE is a set of profiles for exchanging health information. It is designed from the ground up to handle the complexities of Health Information exchange. The relevant profiles are XDR and XDM

Advantages: Using the IHE messaging standard means that NHIN Direct users would be participating in the more advanced NHIN Exchange, they just would not be using all of its power. Merely push messaging has some fundamental limitations and fully participating in the larger NHIN Exchange will allow providers to embrace larger portions of the more advanced health information network when those features are needed. Both Mirth, Open Health Tools, and MOSS provide excellent Open Source implementations of these protocols. IHE provides a formalized mechanism, in an international environment for improving and updating the standard. The largest and biggest EHR vendors already have support for IHE.

Disadvantages: IHE is a moving target. The NHIN CONNECT project is already handling the considerable complexities of mapping to those standards and profiles even as they are finalized. There is already tension there between what CONNECT actually does and what the standards say should be done. The whole point of NHIN Direct is to provide a much simpler model of Health Data exchange than is available with NHIN Exchange. While the big EHR vendors typically have IHE compliant implementations, it is only in the last few years that they have been successfully using them to connect to each other at the Connectathon. Given that, it is something of a stretch to hold out IHE as a fully mature standard. [Update 6-10-10 section removed]

Discussion: The NHIN Exchange will have direct messaging through IHE protocols. Unless you want an AOL/Compuserve (or Twitter/identi.ca/GoogleBuzz) style messaging split between the NHIN Direct/Exchange networks, there will have to be a bride between the messaging protocols. Given that bridge, the real question becomes “Is there any reason not to use the IHE messaging as a backbone and some other protocol at the edges”. (which is essentially what the IHE team is proposing) From what I could tell the critical issue is how much data is “required” to be included as a minimum in any IHE message. Apparently, it will break down if there is not a patient id of some kind in the message (I do not mean a social security number, but something assigned locally by a computer program). This excludes people who do not have a list of patient ids to send from using NHIN Direct to send messages (they can still receive). This essentially makes EHR-integration a requirement; excluding those without a computer system at all, or who are using an antiquated practice management system whose patient id’s would be difficult to access.  So the real question is do we use IHE as the core technology or merely bridge to it?

  • New Implementation Coding Required: Everyone except the large vendors will have to code or adopt Open Source libraries: 5
  • Open Source implementations available: Several very promising projects already in live use: 10
  • Existing experts: IHE is not a well-know protocol: 3
  • Compatibility with NHIN Exchange: it is identical: 10
  • Future Flexibility: There is a formal process in place, but it is hardly fast it has been going for decades: 4
  • Mature Standard: Still in flux: 3
  • End User Interface Familiarity: Very few clinicians use IHE now, so the interfaces are immature: 3
  • False Interface Potential: Although relatively young, the existing IHE messaging clients are designed to handle PHI notions: 7
  • End User Perception: IHE is totally “legit” they might not be happy with it, but they will respect it: 10

Total: 50

SMTP

SMTP is the protocol  behind email.

Advantages: There is a huge expanse of people who are familiar with this protocol stack. It has already been extensively used for this purpose and in this way (with S/MIME). It is the simplest known-good solution. It is the protocol to beat. Plenty of Open Source implementations. Super mature standard that has withstood decades of security scrutiny.

Disadvantages: Email is great and email sucks. It is does not have some features of XMPP, and IHE, and it is such a broad protocol that there are many options that make predictions about how it will be used difficult. It is not out-of-the-box compatible with NHIN Exchange.

  • New Implementation Coding Required: Everything is done: 10
  • Open Source implementations available: old and mature projects to most anything: 10
  • Existing experts: You can’t swing a cat without hitting an SMTP expert: 10
  • Compatibility with NHIN Exchange: must be built from scratch: 1
  • Future Flexibility: the protocol is the protocol, new stuff has to go on top: 3
  • Mature Standard: Is there a more mature standard anywhere?: 10
  • End User Interface Familiarity: Many people familiar with many different mature interfaces: 10
  • False Interface Potential: Users may make the mistake of not seeing that this is -not- just email while using traditional clients: 1
  • End User Perception: they might be a little uncomfortable with “email” but if you say “secure email” that might work: 8

Total: 63

Epilogue

It should be noted that my scoring system is somewhat arbitrary. I think my assessments are fair, but you could easily get different “totals” be choosing different items to include in the comparison. What significant categories of comparison does this ignore? Suggest something in the comments and if it makes sense I will add it.

Update 6-10-10:

So several people have commented on this blog post, and I would encourage you to read all of the comments. They are uniformly well reasoned, even when I disagree with them. I will be updating the scoring with two new categories, and I wanted to explain them.

The first is my response to a comment from David Tao regarding the User Interfaces. My previous scoring is biased in favor of older mature user interfaces. David’s comments made me realize that if a mature interface gave the wrong idea to a clinician or a patient about the working of the system, that even though it was a more stable interface, it could detract from the overall impact of the UI. There is an argument to be make that a “new messaging paradigm (i.e. secure PHI) should be paired with a new interface that exposes the important differences involved”. However I cannot give IHE a “10” in that new category because the IHE messaging systems, in the context of a national exchange are still not mature, but they might still get some benefit from being tailored to PHI exchange. I think both the REST model and the IHE model, which favour newer interface designs should get points here, and IHE should beat REST because they have been testing their new designed for some time. So this is what I mean by “false interface potential” category.

The second is my response to a comment from Erik Pupo. Erik believes that a secure messaging infrastructure based on a chat protocol (XMPP) will not be taken as seriously as other protocols. This is somewhat sad, since I think this is a incorrect public perception about the value of a reliable protocol, but it is unwise for us to be trying to change that unfair public perception even as we try to encourage adoption. Its like saying “here use this tool that you do not take seriously..” not a cogent message for us. So I have added the category of ‘End User Perception” and dinged XMPP for it because of this. I think email, as a known protocol, will also have a slight disadvantage here.

Lastly, I have removed my original criticism of EHRA. Of course, I am still right about the issue 😉 but the project managers decided that the discussion was  unproductive. Given that, it seemed wise to remove that content from this page so that it could remain as a “somewhat not totally subjective” resource. This post is intended to further the legitimate and focused technical debate, and not have us going around in circles about more fundamental issues that we are unlikely to agree on.

-FT

What is NHIN Direct? (alpha)

Recently a member of the FOSS Health community wrote to me:

So I’m confused by NHIN Direct. Why not simply use S/MIME or PGP email? Why five different ways of addressing people, when really only the email-address format makes sense to the average internet user?

I have been pretty confused by the NHIN Direct for quite some time. But I have finally invested enough time that I can discuss the aim of the project somewhat succinctly. Note that this is essentially my re-phrasing of the NHIN Direct FAQ item “What is NHIN Direct“. To implement code, we need to have very exact definitions of what we will or will not do, and often that careful phrasing, while making it easier to code, makes things harder to understand. So the site above, in its current definition reads like this:

NHIN Direct is the set of standards, policies and services that enable simple, secure transport of health information between authorized care providers. NHIN Direct enables standards-based health information exchange in support of core Stage 1 Meaningful Use measures, including communication of summary care records, referrals, discharge summaries and other clinical documents in support of continuity of care and medication reconciliation, and communication of laboratory results to providers.

Lets re-write that in English.

NHIN Direct is like “email for doctors”. NHIN Direct is way for doctors, patients and other healthcare providers to send each other messages, which will feel like email messages, but are different in two important ways. First, the messages can have smart “attachments” that are essentially patient records in standardized formats (CCR/CCD/etc) and second, unlike email, the messages will be sent over a secure network in a HIPPA compliant way. Generally NHIN Direct should replace the current use of fax and email for the transfer of medical records in the US, and provide a stepping stone to greater interoperability with the NHIN Exchange (which is much smarter than just email)

The problem is, at this stage, that you cannot really go much deeper than this high-level thinking, because the NHIN Direct project has not yet settled on which protocol it will be using to enable the messaging. The current candidates are SMTP with S/MIME for handling encryption, XMPP also with S/MIME, REST and the IHE direct messaging profile. I am going to follow this post with a more detailed discussion of that particular decision and its implications, but until that decision is made, it is not really possible to further discuss the NHIN Direct model. In that later model I will discuss more clearly the first part of my friends question.

The second part of the question: “Why the different ways of addressing people?” can be answered now. The NHIN Direct group had a “how do we address” discussion, before we settled on an implementation protocol. That meant that the addressing specification had to implementable using several different protocol stacks. However, the decision was made that all of the addressing mechanisms must be “transferable” into something that looks just like email. Lets imagine that I was going to host my own NHIN Direct node. My address might look like fredtrotter@nhin.fredtrotter.com. When my doctor wanted to send me a message, then that is what he would type into his messaging system. If NHIN Direct decided to go with SMTP, then my address, as it is routed across the NHIN Direct network would look just the way my doctor typed it. But if NHIN Direct uses REST, then it might get transformed into a URI, like this: https://nhin.fredtrotter.com/nhin/v1/nhin.fredtrotter.com/fredtrotter/ . That might look scary, but everyone using NHIN Direct can think in terms of email addresses, because the REST implementation would convert fredtrotter@nhin.fredtrotter.com automatically, we would never even know it was happening.

Eventually, I will extend this article into a better natural language description of the NHIN Direct project, which means later versions will not discuss “if we choose X protocol” but instead focus on the protocol that is actually chosen.

-FT

NHIN Security and Privacy, who is responsible?

I do not know the answer to this question but I am trying to figure it out.

I an active member of the Security and Trust Workgroup of the NHIN Direct project. We are making a few decisions there regarding “rubber meets the road” security infrastructure decisions. But we are very intentionally trying to “bubble up” security and privacy policy decisions to other policy making organizations. But I have to admit, I am not sure who those people are.

In one sense, every healthcare provider in the US will have to make security and privacy policy decisions on their own. There are already some good laws regarding health information and one might argue that given those laws, specific policy details should be left up to providers.

Of course, HHS has an ARRA created group called the HITPC or (Health Information Technology Policy Committee) that will apparently be playing a central role in general NHIN policy making. Further there is a sub-committee there called the Privacy & Security Policy Workgroup. Apparently, if there was a single group who my group would “bubble up” issues to… this would be it. Their charter is:

The Privacy & Security Policy Workgroup will address Privacy and Security in the health IT policy context. At a very high level, the new Privacy & Security Policy Workgroup will define and address the policy challenges related to privacy and security; discuss a set of principles around privacy and security; and various methods of ensuring privacy and security.

The term “very high level” is somewhat problematic from my perspective because the kinds of questions I would like to see answered are pretty specific like “What should NHIN Direct users take into consideration as they choose a provider of X.509 certificates?” That does not sound like to me to be “very high level”.

However, there are some people in this group who have technical know-how. At least some of them should be able to speak the language that I am trying to use. Some of them I know personally. Others I have never heard of. I decided that I would share with you what little information I was able to glean about this small group…

This is exactly the type of group that should be overlooking high-level security and privacy issues. They have lots of different perspectives and lots of different skills, but they all have a very relevant role to play in the future of healthcare information privacy in the United States. But I do not think this is the group to answer the question: “What should NHIN Direct users take into consideration as they choose a provider of X.509 certificates?”

I am happy that at least some of the members of this group would at least know what I am talking about.

I hope this linked list of names is more helpful to you then the list at HHS, which does not really tell you much.

-FT

Responding to Sweeney

I am again discussing the privacy comments from Dr. Latanya Sweeney. She testified to Congress that both the NHIN CONNECT and NHIN Direct security models where flawed.

Figure 2(b) summarizes concerns about these two designs. The NHIN Limited Production Exchange has serious privacy issues but more utility than NHIN Direct. On the other hand, NHIN Direct has fewer privacy issues, but insufficient utility. When combined, we realize the least of each design, providing an NHIN with limited utility and privacy concerns.

You mean both projects are un-private?

I have recently posted about the assumption that NHIN Direct is less functional than NHIN CONNECT. So now I want to talk only about the privacy failings that Dr. Sweeney implies.

I summarize the statement above and her testimony generally to mean that Dr. Sweeney believes that “NHIN CONNECT and NHIN Direct both fail to protect privacy, but NHIN Direct is the lesser of two evils”.   That is a meaningless statement. It is easier to see this if you speak in terms of known Open Source applications. For instance if I say “Apache does not support privacy” or “Firefox does not support privacy” it becomes pretty clear that the point is hog-wash.  I can use Apache to setup a website that only I and my family can access. I can also use Apache to create a website that will abuse users privacy the same way that facebook does. Similarly Firefox can be configured to behave in a more private, and less private way through settings.

Moreover both projects can be used as a software platform that can allow other programs to increase or decrease privacy. mod_ssl is a perfect example with Apache, and this is even more apparent with Firefox, which already has tools that help publish browsing habits, and also has several tools to make browsing more private. (Update Jan 9, 2018 These FireFox links will no longer work, as described here)

As with any software project and protocol, it is possible that there are privacy implications in the underlying protocols and there is also the possibility that through mis-implementation either Open Source project could create a security or privacy risk where none exists in a correct implementation of the protocol. There is nothing to be done about this. This is a problem with software generally, and the best we can do is to put both the protocols and the implementations of those protocols out in the open so that security researchers can look for flaws. For both NHIN CONNECT and NHIN Direct this has already been done or is happening now.

Further more, the underlying protocols for both NHIN Direct and CONNECT are designed to allow for different kinds of privacy policy and enforcement. From a configuration point of view, both projects will be able to support extensive consumer consent options for instance, or they could be configured to generally ignore consumer consent. For that matter they could both be configured not to share any information at all, or to only accept in-bound data and not send data out.

From a merely rational point of view, most doctors in the US have email accounts but rarely use them to send PHI. When they do send PHI, it is usually legal and privacy respecting. This is not always true, but there is nothing that we can do with “email” to make it more true. It is not about the technology but how you use it.

Design Patterns are a Straw Man

Dr. Sweeney suggests that “For example, a domestic violence stalker can use the system to locate victims.”. But each node on the current and future NHIN Exchange will have the ability to monitor for strange searches and should be able to easily detect if a user frequently searches for 20-25 year old women who live near them. Are those policies and procedures enough? Hard to say since I have no idea what they are. Latanya does not indicate what they are either, but still makes this assertion.

Generally, assertions of privacy violations without evidence seems to be modus operandi for the patient privacy rights team and Latanya seems to be holding to form. Ironically, the new NHIN Exchange should allow for detection of the kind of abuse that Dr. Peel and Dr. Sweeney assert is common. While the current fax based system would allow them to go undetected. Dr. Sweeney gives several “for examples’

  • for example, a domestic violence stalker can use the system to locate victims.
  • for example, an insider could receive notifications of all abortions performed at other organizations.

in both of these examples, if the “black hat” in question is currently monitoring all incoming faxes at a local planned parenthood headquarters, and has a pen and paper handy, he can get all of this information now… but there is no way to detect that. It would not have to be a betrayal by an insider either. A tap could be placed on the fax line, even from outside the building. Both of these attacks are undetectable today.  Ironically, the NHIN Exchange sometimes prevent these kinds of abuses and the rest of the time it would provide precisely the evidence for information leaking that both Dr. Peel and Dr. Sweeny assert is common.

Dr Sweeny asserts:

Corrections (see Figure 5). In the data sharing environments described so far, there is no mechanism for propagating corrections or updating patient information.

But then she also says:

In one version [10], event messaging allowed 3rd party notification of patient information outside the direct care of the patient and without the patient’s knowledge.

I do not want to straw man her position here, she is talking about two different theoretical designs as she makes these statements. But there is a tradeoff here. The actual standards (Section 1.3) implemented in NHIN Exchange specifically state that:

In addition to “Query/Retrieve” and “Push”, the NHIN must support a publish and subscribe information exchange pattern in order to enable a wide range of transaction types. HIEM defines a generic publish and subscribe mechanism that can be used to enable various use cases. Examples include….   Support for notification of the availability of new or updated data

So in the real world.. we do have a problem with “event messaging” potentially used as a means to violate privacy, but because of event messaging we do not have a problem with broadcasting corrections to patient data.  There is a tradeoff here. Exactly the kind of tradeoff that Dr. Sweeney says we do not need to make:

Figure 2(a) depicts the traditional false belief of trading privacy for utility. It also shows our 9-year experience in the Data Privacy Lab of finding sweet spots of solutions that give privacy and utility. The key to our success has been technology design.

I want to be clear. I agree that there are sweet spots of “acceptable privacy and acceptable utility”. In fact in this situation the “technology fix” is to do extensive logging and auditing on who is looking at what so that you can detect the abuse that a comprehensive alert system makes possible. I could talk about how you might do that, but again looking at the actual standards you find a comprehensive description (Section 5).

Dr Sweeney ends her testimony with the suggestion that:

Performing risk analyses on design patterns provides a clear, informative path.

But that is simply not true. In fact, her own “start” to performing a risk analysis on design patterns serves only to devalue the work that has already been done on NHIN CONNECT and is now being done on NHIN Direct. Criticizing a design pattern not used in given software, and then implying that the given software also suffers from those problems is a straw man process.

Dr Peel has said to me that she feels that Dr. Sweeney is being ignored and I can see why now that I have carefully read her testimony. I would welcome specific criticisms of the security protocol designs that we will be using on NHIN Direct. But I would suggest that Dr. Sweeney make criticisms on either particular software or at least a specific “Design” rather than a “Design Pattern”. Currently Dr. Sweeney is over-simplifying NHIN CONNECT  by talking about “design patterns” which are not used. The first consensus draft of the  NHIN Direct security protocol design does not even exist as I am writing this post, while Dr. Sweeney’s testimony is already more than a month old. I fail to see how she could say anything legitimate about the NHIN Direct security and privacy design at all, one way or another.

I would suggest, as I have said to Dr. Peel in person not 48 hours ago, that if Dr. Peel, Dr. Sweeney and Patient Privacy Rights generally want to be included in the relevant discussions, that that they try and keep their discussions relevant.  You are literally criticizing what we are NOT doing, and then implying that ONC is not working with you. I know that your hearts are in the right place, but I cannot code what you describe.

-FT

Halamka on Open Source Healthcare

John Halamka is a pretty important blogger and policy maker. He is a fan of Open Source and has been positive about it for years. He even let me write a guest post on his blog about it.

John Williams sent me a link for the recorded audio and slides of his recent talk at Open Your World Forum

He discusses just how prevalent the notions of Open Source and open data standards are already in the coming ARRA-based Health Informatics world. He even hones in on critical problems like the proprietary CPT codebase.

He also gives compelling clues about how critical Red Hat servers are in his environment, and how Linux and other platform level Open Source has been well-adopted.

-FT

The Power of Push

Hi,

The NHIN Direct network has been criticized for lacking relevance for health information exchange. Specifically, Latanya Sweeney has submitted testimony to congress which has nothing good to say about either NHIN project. The paragraph I want to highlight says:

ONC’s website also describes NHIN Direct [11] as a parallel initiative underway [3]. The idea came from comments made by representatives from Microsoft and Cerner [12]. In current practice, two providers fax patient information as needed. So, the idea is to replace the fax with email that has secure channels to combat eavesdropping. There are numerous concerns with this design also. A glaring problem is its limitation. We cannot perform all meaningful uses with this system, so we will need an additional system, which begs the question: why build this system at all? For example, this design cannot reasonably retrieve allergies and medications for an unconscious patient presenting at an out-of-state emergency room (arguably a stage 1 meaningful use). Figure 2(b) summarizes concerns about these two designs. The NHIN Limited Production Exchange has serious privacy issues but more utility than NHIN Direct. On the other hand, NHIN Direct has fewer privacy issues, but insufficient utility. When combined, we realize the least of each design, providing an NHIN with limited utility and privacy concerns.

This  is not the first time that the NHIN Direct push-only model has come under attack, so I wanted to discuss this. Push-only means that A can send messages to B, but B cannot automatically get data  from A (that would be pulling). Email and Faxes are push models. Web pages are pull models (i.e. sent to you when your browser asks for them). The  benefits of both models are constantly debated in software design .

I am working on NHIN Direct, and not so much NHIN CONNECT, although I have great admiration for the project and many of my friends are working on that project. My experience with NHIN Direct, which has been excellent so far, has helped me to understand just how narrow-minded and short sighted these kinds of criticisms are.

Both projects, in so far as such a thing is possible while building technology, are taking a “policy-neutral” stance. That means that rather than defining policy in code, we try to code so that a broad range of reasonable policy decisions can be supported in a given protocol and codebase. But even under a given policy, there will be many many options to use these technologies in ways that are unexpected. So when anyone criticizes the “security and privacy features” of either CONNECT or Direct at this stage… it is typically by making certain poor assumptions about how the system will be actually used.

The most important poor assumption is to consider only standard uses of the technology when considering meaningful use. For instance, the NHIN Direct project concedes that mere usage of the NHIN Direct exchange will map to specific meaningful use requirements. Note the headers on that PDF to see that this map was contributed by my friend Will Ross and the Redwood Mednet team. In Open Source healthcare, as in Open Source generally, you see the same actors generating excellent contributions again and again. But these meaningful use mappings only consider the implications of mere use of the network, rather than considering anything that can be implemented on top of the network.

When people say the ‘Internet” what they usually mean is either email or the world wide web. In reality the “Internet” is a far richer technology space than this, but for most people only two of the thousands of protocols that operate over the Internet have become personally relevant: SMTP and HTTP/HTML. In fact as I say that, many of my clinical readers might not even recognize that SMTP, and sister protocols like IMAP, are the protocols that enable email, or that HTTP/HTML enable the world wide web. In fact both of these protocols rely on lower level protocols, like IP/UDP/TCP/SSL/DNS that enable the average user to surf and email.

But understand that the richness of the Internet, as we know it today, is not merely what the protocol implementations allow you to do directly (i.e. browsers let you surf the web and email clients let you read and send messages) but how those technologies are used. The web allows you to buy books on Amazon, win auctions on ebay and find dates on eharmony. Each of those website enables complex application functionality on top of the implementations of http and html.

It is easier to see how the web has more to offer than merely transferring hyper-linked web pages, to see the richness that is available at the application level that is not implied or assumed by the lower level implementations of the enabling protocols (that would be web-browsers and web-servers implementing http/html). Sometimes it easy to forget that we see the same thing with email. The email network does far, far more than merely send and receive messages . Like the web, higher level functionality is enabled by the lower level protocol driven functionality, in this case the ability to send and receive messages.

I wanted to highlight several things that you can do with email, that are examples of this higher-level functionality.

  • You can use an email account to prove that you are a human to a website. Have you ever signed up to a website that insisted that you give them an email address and then automatically sent you an email that had something to click on to prove that you owned that email address? I have done this so many times that I have lost count. This is “email for authentication”. Software often uses email messages to provide greater access to websites.
  • You can send messages to just one email address, which will then be sent to many other email addresses. Mailing lists can be pretty amazing software services, but fundamentally all they do is intelligently receive and re-send email messages. This makes email change from a one-to-one messaging system to a one-to-many messaging system. But it is implemented entirely with one-to-one messages.
  • If you push the mailing list even farther you can see that it can become something even more substantial, like craigslist, which pushes the envelope on email broadcasting and blurs the lines between email application and web application.
  • Programs can automatically send email messages when something changes, like Google Alerts tell you when the web has changed (or at least changed as-according-to Google)
  • You can have many email addresses and configure them to aggregate to one email viewing client, enabling separate relationships, and even identities to be managed in parallel. For instance your work email address really means your work identity, and your personal email means your personal identity, but you might forward both to the same email client and then answer and send messages as both identities at the same time.
  • You can use email to create a system for recycling things. Making it easier not to buy new things, and not to throw away working things. This is essentially email-enabled peer-to-peer conservationism.
  • Email clients are more than just programs we use to send and receive messages. We expect them to integrate with calendaring software. We expect them to allow us to extend them with other programs. People use powerful email clients like gmail to run their lives before people started to do that with gmail, they where running their lives with outlook or eudora.

Email is not just a method for sending messages. It is an application platform. Other applications that want to do something interesting can use email as a messaging component to achieve that greater goal.

I want to be clear. The NHIN Direct project has not settled on STMP, or email as protocol choice (although an S/MIME email is on the table). At this point we are not sure what protocol we will be choosing. But it does not matter, the point here is that NHIN Direct will at least act like, private, secure, identity-assured (at least for clinicians) email for sending clinical messages. You can expect that a NHIN Direct implementation will either be tightly or loosely integrated with a doctors EHR and a patients PHR in the same way that you have tight or loose integration between email clients and calendaring applications.

At this point it is best to think of NHIN Direct as a “cousin” to email. With lots of the same features and benefits but also limitations (to protect privacy) and new features (clinical integration, meaningful message signing, etc etc) that email does not have.

But the most important shared benifit between NHIN Direct and email will be the fact that you can build new interesting stuff on top of it.

Which brings us back to Latanyas first criticism. Will NHIN Direct support the ‘break the glass’ use-case (where your information can be gotten-to in case of an emergency) that Latanya mentions? No. Will software that implements NHIN Direct be able to use NHIN Direct as part of an something that provides break-the-glass functionality? Yes.

Very soon after an NHIN Direct network stabilizes, you will start to see this functionality addresses this use case. PHR applications like Google Health, HealthVault and Indivo X (the most important three PHr platforms) will probably develop break the glass mechanisms that work something like this…

I am an emergency room doctor and a patient comes in unconscious. In his wallet I find a card that indicates his PHR is held at johndoe@healthvault.com.

I visit healthvault.com and click the “break the glass” link. HealthVault asks me to enter my NHIN Direct address.. which is going to look a lot like an email address. So I enter fred.trotter@nhin.methodisthospital.com (not a real address). HealthVault will have already performed extensive public key exchange with Methodist Hospital, and will be able to cryptically ensure that any address under that domain name (we call them health domain names.. since they will be used exclusively for this purpose) is in fact someone that Methodist Hospital vouches for, and they will have pre-approved Methodist Hospitals PHI handling procedures. Given that pre-arrangement of trust, they will know that they can securely send messages to any published Methodist hospital NHIN Direct address.

But they are not certain, at this stage, that I am in fact fred.trotter@nhin.methodisthospital.com so they will send a message to that address with a link. I will click the link which will confirm with HealthVault that I am in control of that address, and that they should forward the contents of the johndoe@healthvault.com PHR record. Now that they are sure that this is a valid break-the-glass request from a valid user at an institution that they have a trust relationship with, they will forward the record to the address.

They will also add a record to john’s PHR to indicate that I broke the glass. If this whole process was done fraudulently, John will know and there will be hell to pay for me personally for abusing my credentials and for Methodist Hospital for giving me a credentials to abuse. Current HIPAA rules and fraud statutes would be activated if I made such a fraudulent request, that was not in John’s best interest. People who abuse the system could be detected and sent to jail.

The whole process takes minutes and works even when the patient is unconscious.

Would that particular method answer the “break the glass” components of meaningful use? It seems like it would to me. Would this be the method that we end up using? I am not sure, but it would be something similar in spirit. Most importantly, it would be something  implemented on top of, and around, the messaging model provided by NHIN Direct.

All of that is to say: Push is Powerful. It is powerful because it does not need to work alone. It can be a component of a larger system that does much more. It creates the opportunity for innovation and greater functionality similar to the one provided by the original Internet protocols.

This is all true of the NHIN CONNECT project as well. The difference is that NHIN Direct is much simpler and has true parallels with the current fax and email systems. It is easier to see how NHIN Direct might change things because we are so familiar with its cousins, email and fax.

NHIN CONNECT offers much more functionality at the price of far greater complexity. Like the NHIN Direct system, and email and web before it, the NHIN CONNECT architecture will allow for innovation to occur on top of it. But it is doing much more work than NHIN Direct is.

For instance, if I were fully NHIN CONNECT enabled, I would be able to conduct a search for John Doe and find out that three hospitals had information that were not contained in the HealthVault record. NHIN CONNECT might be able to provide a merged view of that data for me, which is a much richer process than mere messaging can achieve. But that means that NHIN CONNECT must tackle the complex problems of sorting out which records actually belonged to John Doe and therefore deserved to be merged. It would make automated, but accurate, decisions that Jonathan Doe at hospital A was my John Doe but that Johnny Doe at hospital B was not… NHIN CONNECT  should understand that a blood pressure measurement that was in the data it gathered from HealthVault was or was not a duplicate of blood pressure readings that came from the hospital C EHR, that had the same date, but not the same time stamp. These kinds of issues, plus countless more just like them, are addressed or exposed by both the underlying NHIN protocols that CONNECT implements and by the CONNECT codebase specifically.

CONNECT uses push and pull and all kinds of other software models to do something very complex.

NHIN Direct just does push, but leaves potential complexity to higher level yet-to-be-made systems.

Some people think the NHIN Direct model is superior. Others think that CONNECT is better. I think we probably need both for different reasons.. which is essentially the ONC position on the matter.

But I wanted to be sure everyone was clear: Push has Power.

-FT

The Burden of Trust

Hi,

I am a vocal participant on the NHIN Direct Security and Trust working group. Its a perfect place for me. I love Open Source healthcare, but my background was in InfoSec… and we never really forget our first love.. do we? At the NHIN Direct Security and Trust workgroup, I get to exercise all of my hats at once… and that is fun.

The purpose of NHIN Direct is to design an infrastructure for sending messages with clinical content between clinicians (and their patients). It is basically designed to be an email-like system for delivering health information. It is intend to eventually replace the current NHIN… which is the ad-hoc clinical fax network.

On a recent call, someone from the “Policy” department said something about our current plans to the effect of “I am not sure how putting the burden of Trust Decisions on individual providers will impact the ability of the project to replace the Fax network” I could not talk on the call… I was in a noisy airport… but I was surprised by that characterization of our work. In retrospect I can see how she would read what we are writing and come to the conclusion that we are putting new trust burdens on doctors… but in fact we want to lighten the trust burden they currently carry.

You don’t know the devil that you know

That is probably the most important point. The fax network comes with a very heavy trust burden. But we are used to it, so we rarely pay attention to it. This is a case of “acceptable losses”. Its kind of like Terrorism vs Auto Accidents. Many more people in the world are killed in car accidents each year than are killed by terrorism. The irony is that terrorism is much harder to fix than auto accidents. If the US Govt devoted the same budget to auto accidents that they do to the “War on Terror” we could probably prevent 99% of the auto accidents in the world. But we, as a society “accept” the burden of car crashes… because we are used to them. We have the same problem with medical errors… but that is another post.

So lets take a careful look at the “current trust burden” in the fax network. First, doctors do not actually deal with this problem directly. Typically they hire staff to do faxing. This isolates them from the problems that the “faxer” faces. It also means that they rarely hear of the errors.

“Faxers” fax to patients, and they fax to other clinicians. There are lots and lots of times when something that should have been faxed to Dr. Smith ends up going to Dr. Jones. We only hear about the most extreme cases. In fact before the existence of the NPI database, there was no reliable way to determine if a fax number was valid. If Dr. Adams wanted to send a record to Dr. Smith, his staff called their staff and wrote down the numbers. The numbers get jumbled, mislabelled and lots and lots of errors occur.

We do not hear of the cases where people were killed because information that was in a fax record was faxed to a wrong number. Perhaps sent to the “main hospital” fax line instead of the ER fax line where it was needed. These types of between-institution errors are almost impossible to detect, even the “big picture” at one large hospital is hard to sort out, and when you add another institution… no hope. Instead you get cases that are written off as “we did not know that X… oh well… nobody’s fault… nothing could be done”.

Then of course there is the assumption that fax lines are private. This is the farthest thing from the truth. Faxes, just like regular phone conversations are digitized and sent over the Internet. If a hacker gains control over a main router at a major Internet carrier, then they can re-route phone calls and faxes to themselves as well normal internet traffic. The fax network is actually going over the Internet right now… its just “obscured” rather than “encrypted”.

This is not the only problem with faxes, another problem is that institutions rarely have a firm grasp on how many fax machines are actually in operation. You can plug a computer modem into a wall and have a nearly undetectable new fax line… allowing “insiders” to send files to themselves via fax. In fact, phone lines can generally be re-purposed in to back-channel data ports in a number of ways, faxing is only one of them. Lots of my old Air Force buddies ended up at Securelogix, which is one of the top companies for phone security. They sell a telewall that can help prevent phone lines from being re-purposed. Its just what its name implies, a firewall for telephones. No large institution that I have every heard of that paid for a penetration test that include wardialing has ever had the wardialing effort return 0 rouge fax/modem instances. Clinicians should not assume that they understand their own fax infrastructure.

Even if you are really careful with who you fax to.. the current fax network is that it is difficult to maintain. Lets say that Dr. Smith sells his practice to Dr. Sneaky. If the fax number does not change, then Dr. Sneaky is going to get all of those faxes that were intended for Dr. Smith. Not good.

The problem with comparing the devil you know with the devil that you don’t know is that usually, you don’t actually know the first devil that well at all. The “trust burden” on the Fax network seems light because it is hopelessly broken  and we all just tolerate it.

A lighter burden

Which brings me to the “trust burden for NHIN Direct”. Our goal with regard to this burden is two fold:

  • When an NHIN Direct user makes a trust decision, it should me more reliable than the equivalent decision on the fax network.
  • Typical NHIN Direct users should be able to avoid directly managing trust at scale, making fewer and therefore better trust decisions.

The first one is easy. Without knowing exactly what standards we will be selecting at the time of the writing, I can already tell you that the security the NHIN Direct network will be an improvement over the Fax network. Moreover, it will provide more and better information to the users of the network than is possible with the fax network. Without going into the gory details, this is because PKI is better than post-it notes full of names and fax numbers for maintaining a secure information transfer.

The second one is a little tricky. What I mean by “trust at scale” is the problem managing lots of peer-to-peer trust relationships. If we have a NHIN where say, a third of all doctors in the Unites States participate, that is still probably over a million people. There is no way that you are going to get a doctor to make a list of all of the doctors that he/she does/does not trust taken from a million person list. Even trying to do peer-to-peer trust on a city level would not work. Hell I would be surprised if it would work even between two hospitals. (If you gave doctors the option to “not trust” some doctors at their own hospital… you would probably still get headaches). The fax trust management problem is a little simpler because you can sometimes aggregate to the organization… several clinicians share the same fax, but even that it is really difficult. Having to manage thousands of trust relationships dramatically increases the probability that you will get one of them wrong.

How do we fix that? We need trust aggregation points. So far there are two of these in our model. The first is at the organization level, just like faxes. Typical NHIN direct addresses for providers working in hospitals or clinics will look something like drsmith@nhin.localhospital.com the “nhin.localhospital.com” part of the address is the “health domain name” and you could use that to trust all of the messages that came from that health domain name. The second way is with what we are calling Anchor CAs. For those familiar with the way CAs (Certificate Authorities) work with https, it is basically the same. The difference is that there will be no “automatically included” Certificate Authorities. When you login at amazon your browser makes a secure connection automatically because the person who makes your browser decide for you that you would trust Versign CA certificates. You can find out how your browser developer makes this trust decision for you… but they are still making the decision for you.

That model… where someone else makes your trust decisions for you… is not going to fly in healthcare. The stakes are simply to high to outsource trust in this fashion.

However, the notion of aggregating trust using Certificate Authorities is a good one. Lets imagine that my home town, Houston, decided to setup a Certificate Authority. They would decide on some reasonable policies for things like:

  1. Anti-virus (think Storm Worm not Influenza)
  2. Firewalls
  3. at-rest disk Encryption
  4. Password Strength
  5. Local Authentication (two factor?)
  6. Logging
  7. etc
  8. etc

Then the Houston HIE would create a CA, and that CA would “vouch” for organizations and individuals on the NHIN Direct network. BobsClinic might signup for the CA, then the CA would follow a bunch of steps to verify that BobsClinic was legit and was willing and capable of following the policy… and then the CA would say.. ok we are willing to vouch for BobsClinic.

Most clinics in Houston who wanted to use NHIN Direct could “import” the public key of the local CA. That’s fancy talk for they would accept the vouches that the CA made for all of the organizations that signed up. Those of you with security backgrounds understand that we are talking about a pretty basic CA infrastructure, but we wanted a way to make the trust decisions that clinicians would be making under this model free of unneeded technical language. So we are calling the CA, and all of the people that the CA “vouches” for a “Trust Circle”. It makes sense… if you have not imported the certificate of the CA, you are “outside the circle”, if you have imported the public cert of the CA then you are “inside the circle”.

This “Trust Circle” notion will reduce the number of trust decisions that typical NHIN Direct users will need to make. Of course, it will be really important that clinicians are very careful when they evaluate the policies and enforcement provided by a given CA. Those policies should meet or exceed their internal standards for handling PHI. It is important because you are not just trusting one organization… you are trusting lots of organizations “through” one organization, a much bigger deal.

Trust Circles get around the thorny problem of managing peer to peer relationships, but the also dodge another bullet. They avoid the need for a top-down single CA architecture. Things would be much simpler, technically, if the NHIN (which is a too-vague term BTW) would just setup the one-ring-to-rule them CA and make everyone in the United States follow the same policy for exchanging health information. That is a deal killer for about a hundred reasons, here are a few…

  • You are going to try and force catholic charity hospitals to share information with planned parenthood clinics.. are you kidding?
  • Making psychiatric hospitals message each other in the same way that normal hospitals do?
  • Make children’s hospitals message the same way that normal hospitals do? (kids are not just short people… Think about it.. Does the step dad get NHIN Direct messages for little johnny or only his biological father get them? Tough issues there.)
  • Create a policy that is guaranteed to be legal in all 50 states? (think about the implications of medical marijuana in California alone)

Policy is really really hard, even if you do not assume that you are going to get everyone to agree. Assuming that everyone will agree… makes the NHIN a non-starter.

Trust Circles (plural) gets you out of that problem. When organizations and clinicians can see eye to eye on policy, then they can use NHIN Direct to communicate secure messages… when they can’t see eye to eye… nothing in the NHIN Direct security protocols will attempt to force or even encourage them to compromise.

Another thing to note is that there is nothing in the design that prevents NHIN Direct users from managing trust relationships one at a time. You do not have to join Trust Circles to send messages with NHIN Direct. If you want to “self-sign” your certs and exchange them on floppy disks, in person, with people you trust.. that works too! That is why I used the word “typical” above…

But now we come to the real problem.

The first step is..

Even though the trust burden of the NHIN Direct system will be less than the trust burden of the current fax network… it may not feel that way. The reason is that we have not actually taken responsibility for the trust we place in the fax network. We continue to pretend that everything is fine. But its not. The fax network is irreparably broken and the first step towards fixing it is NOT to try and design a new model without a heavy trust burden, but to recognize that we have problem. Once we do that we can see that indeed “the burden is light”.

Speaking at OSCON

Hi,

I am honored to announce that I will be speaking at OSCON 2010 on the healthcare track.

This talk is my “Health of the Source” talk. My intention in this talk is to cover both the “spirit” of Open Source in Healthcare as well as the “letter” of what is specifically going on right now. If you are unfamiliar with Open Source in Healthcare, and you can only attend one single talk on the subject, you should attend my talk. You will learn the most about the most different things. If you want to attend more than one talk, you should probably read Andy Orams summary of the OSCON healthcare talks.

As always, I am asking my readers and followers to tweet me about things that are happening in Open Source Healthcare that I should mention. If you could not get a spot at the conference but you are doing something wonderful, let me know and I will try and mention your work to the right people.

-FT

Science Conjecture in Science policy

Science-based policy is pretty difficult to do, but I support the notion.

But when is science conjecture taking the place of science? I know that this guy is not being quoted directly, but paraphrased by a reporter. That has been done to me enough that I know this strips what a person actually says of any nuance… but still something about the following statement makes me very comfortable.

The response of the doctor in charge was paraphrased as:

He acknowledged that it was impossible to specify just how many cancers were environmentally caused, because not enough research had been done, but he said he was confident that when the research was done, it would confirm the panel’s assertion that the problem had been grossly underestimated.

Does this scare the heebie jeebies out of any one else?

A person in the role of scientist making a policy recommendations based on what science will “soon” find? What does that even mean? Don’t get me wrong, I think we should totally be on carcinogen patrol, be when do good intentions begin to betray the scientific process?

-FT

Doctor impatient with NHIN security dithering

Recently, the members of the NHIN Direct Security and Trust working group (brian and I at least) were criticized for dithering:

> Fred and Brian,  I love what you’re trying to do for FOSS and data
> interchangeability.  You’re dedicated, smart, expert programmers and
> systems experts. You want to be socially responsible, and protect
> people from HIPAA violations.  I think your design principles as
> expressed at http://nhindirect.org/Design+Principles  are exactly
> right, but I think NHIN has been led astray as to what its mission
> ought to be, and this matters very much to me as an eventual user of
> health data interchange.

leading to…

> Okay, let’s get this straight. Under the HIPAA law,  Covered Entities,
> such as doctors offices, are responsible for protecting PHI, not the
> manufacturer of the fax machine the office uses to send information to
> another office, or the folks who write specifications for fax
> transmission.  Does this still make sense?
>
> OK.  Your job at NHIN is to design a fax machine.  “Just the fax,
> ma’am.”  Covered Entities, such as doctors offices and hospitals, are
> responsible for what information will be sent, and are responsible for
> protecting it (at BOTH ends).  Another government agency (hhs.gov/
> ocr)  is responsible for enforcing HIPAA, not NHIN.    You just have
> to provide the highway to send the information, and make sure it gets
> to an actual covered entity. That’s ALL you have to do!
>
> I think you’re suffering from ‘Mission Creep’. You’re trying to make
> sure no one ever violates HIPAA with their fax machine.  Dang near
> impossible.  Thankfully, not your job.Yes. It makes perfect sense.

But I am not arguing that with you.

Doctors trust fax machines to provide private point to point communications.
The do not even wonder if fax machines “actually” provide private point to point communications.
In fact fax connections can be sniffed, which is why they have tele-walls now (a firewall for telephones)

And even that does not prevent the “wrong number problem”

But even if we accept your premise, that we need to make NHIN Direct “just like a fax machine” someone, somewhere dithered about how faxing should be implemented. They went in circles with different ideas. They negotiated between different vendors of machine technology and they came up with a standard that could be implemented by a hardware company to build a fax machine. Here are some of the results of that.

To make something “simple like a fax machine” we need to have a set of instructions that people like EPIC, Medsphere, Google, Microsoft and Indivo can all implement identically. Those instructions might feel like they are far too complex for the simple task at hand. However we are already following Einsteins edict: “as simple as possible, but no simpler”. I think you will find that almost every discussion on the forums -has- a point. A valid concern that really should be addressed.

Main difference between a FAX machine and NHIN Direct is that, for whatever reason, Doctor’s do not distrust the security implications of a fax.
However, they -already have- faxes, which they already trust. When NHIN Direct and CONNECT come out, the “trust models” and “trust implementations” will be subject to intense scrutiny by security researchers who are decidedly better about thinking about these issues than I am. If a strong majority of those security researchers are not generally satisfied with our decisions, then they could act to cause doctors not to trust our design. This is a potential problem even if we design it right.

You are absolutely right, the law makes doctors responsible for HIPAA violations, but you forget the extension, they may also be held responsible for trusting the wrong technology. If a doctor downloaded Kazaa and accidentally published patient files on the Internet, do you think that a judge would be patient with his argument that ” it was a flaw in the technology!”. It is the doctor’s responsibly to be reasonably sure that a technology does do something that would be illegal. Currently doctors trust the “known-good” fax network. But will they trust NHIN-Direct? The answer is “of course they will”. But only because the security community will look at what we are proposing and say “well that looks reasonable” and they will only do that because we are getting our proverbial shit proverbially together.

I would suggest that you please be patient with our security sausage-making, I believe you will like the final result.

Regards,
-FT